Terraforming Mars

The hard science & bizarre culture surrounding the sci-fi concept

BY NOAH HAGGERTY, APPLIED PHYSICS, 2024 DESIGN BY KAI GRAVEL-PUCILLO, ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE, 2022

Elon Musk walks out to applause for his September

2015 interview on “The Late Show with Stephen

Colbert.” After exchanging pleasantries, Colbert asks Musk about his fascination with our closest solar neighbor: “You sincerely think that we should go to Mars … Why do we want to go to Mars? It’s uninhabitable.”

“It is a fixer-upper of a planet,” Musk responds, eliciting laughter from the audience. “At first you’re going to have to live in transparent domes, but eventually you can transform Mars into an Earth-like planet.”

The concept Musk is referring to — transforming the environment of another planet to make it hospitable for human life — is known as “terraforming” and was first coined by science fiction writer Jack Williamson in 1942. Terraforming Mars would require raising its atmospheric pressure from 0.006 atmospheres to Earth’s 1 atmosphere and increasing the temperature by about 60 degrees Celsius. Many methods for achieving this have been proposed, some as implausible as multi-kilometer wide space mirrors to reflect extra sunlight onto the planet and bioengineered extra-tough Martian plants to develop the atmosphere. The most discussed and scientifically realistic proposal involves extracting carbon from the surface and releasing it into the atmosphere to create a greenhouse effect (the same mechanism driving climate change on Earth). The concept has steadily grown in popularity, exploding in recent years. It has gained an almost cult-like following, assisted by Musk and other advocates for a human mission to Mars — including aerospace engineer and author Robert Zubrin and director Chris McKay, best known for “The LEGO Batman Movie.”

Colbert presses Musk. “How would you warm Mars up? You know it’s a long way away from the Sun.”

Musk chuckles. “The fast way is [to] drop thermonuclear weapons over the poles.”

“You’re a supervillain!” Colbert retorts, poking at the absurdity of the statement. Nevertheless, the concept has been seriously considered by scientists and put through the rigor of the scientific process. So, could it work?

“No, it will not work,” says Dr. Bruce Jakosky, a planetary scientist and the principal investigator for NASA’s MAVEN Mars Orbiter, focused on studying the Martian Atmosphere. “Nuking the poles would release any CO₂ that is trapped there back into the atmosphere … This would … not produce any significant greenhouse warming,” Jakosky told NU Sci. He authored a 2018 paper taking inventory of all the accessible carbon reservoirs on Mars that could be used in a terraforming process. The list is exhaustive, including carbon that has been absorbed by Mars’s iconic red surface material, carbon molecules buried deep in rich mineral plains, and carbon frozen in the polar ice. However, releasing all this carbon would be a virtually impossible task, likely requiring future Martians to strip-mine and scorch practically the entire surface and detonate explosives or nuclear weapons at the poles, yet all of this would only increase the pressure to, at most, roughly 20 percent of Earth’s.

When asked if he believed there was consensus within the scientific community supporting his conclusion, Jakosky said, “Yes, but consensus does not imply unanimity,” joking, “I suspect that Chris McKay might disagree with my conclusions,” referring to the pro-terraforming “LEGO Batman” director. While scientists agree that terraformation will not be possible without a paradigm shift in humanity’s technological capability, which NASA publicly agreed with in a 2018 press statement, there is a large portion of space and science enthusiasts who reject this consensus.

These individuals find community in the Facebook group for Zubrin’s space exploration advocacy organization “The Mars Society.” Members frequently share terraforming artwork, affirming articles, and their own terraformation ideas — sometimes done so in personal PDF files masquerading as scientific papers. These eccentric ideas range from deliberately smashing asteroids into Mars to funneling particles from space into the atmosphere using a colossal orbiting magnetic ring the size of New York City. Users post and ridicule the 2018 NASA press release regularly — almost three years after its publication.

Terraformation is, at its heart, a product of science fiction and not a rigorous scientific concept, and there is a real risk in conflating a science-fiction thought experiment with reality. Jakosky warned, “I think it’s dangerous to take seriously the idea that Mars can serve as a ‘backup’ planet in case the Earth becomes uninhabitable. If we believe that, it’s too easy to fall into the trap of not taking care of the Earth … It’ll always be easier to fix our climate than to change the Martian climate into one that is suitable for us.”

Opinion: Stargazing will be redefined for future generations

BY SHARMILA KUTHUNUR, JOURNALISM, 2022 DESIGN BY NICHOLAS BERRY, MECHANICAL ENGINEERING, 2024

My generation may be the last

to be able to gaze upon a starstudded sky.

One night in early 2017, from the terrace of a relative’s home in a tiny village in India, I was astonished and delighted to see the sky packed with stars. Many glowed dimly but steadily. A handful of them had to be planets in our system. Countless of them were untouched worlds far away.

Four years later, I still remember that feeling of wonder and yearning to share that with the next generation. While they will see the night sky dotted with lights, I fear those dots will consist more of satellites than of stars. The few stars that will be visible may be indistinguishable from the swarm of satellites that will be orbiting above the Earth.

Since May 2019, SpaceX has been steadily deploying satellites into low-Earth orbit to build a satellite constellation. It placed 60 satellites in orbit on February 5, according to tweets from the company. Missions will continue, culminating in 42,000 satellites in orbit.

SpaceX plans to provide a high-speed internet connection to every corner of earth through Starlink. Musk told reporters in 2019 that Starlink is “a way for SpaceX to generate revenue” to “develop more advanced rockets and spaceships.”

“We think this is a key stepping stone on the way to establishing a self-sustaining city on Mars and a base on the moon,” said Elon Musk in 2019.

The first step to going to the moon and Mars is to have a clear orbit to launch spacecraft. It seems contradictory that Musk is crowding the orbit with satellites while using that money to try and get through the same interface. In September 2020, Washington state’s first responders tweeted appreciation and used Starlink internet to connect with residents after a fire destroyed parts of the town of Malden. But positive instances of an expensive internet connection are few and far between.

The satellites, which are already 99 percent brighter than other satellites in space, change orbits autonomously. For astronomers, “observations cannot be scheduled to avoid them,” according to a prepublished paper outlining concerns astronomers face.

SpaceX satellites are arranged in a line, just 200 miles above Earth, where they leave trails of reflected light in their wake. According to the paper, the satellites are bright enough to be seen with the naked eye, especially before sunrise and after sunset — when most observations in astronomy occur. The satellites reflect sunlight, thereby blinding sensitive telescopes from seeing past their scintillating barrier. Even if only a handful of them pass through a telescope’s view, they mar observations.

More than 2,000 astronomers on a blog are formally appealing to institutions and governments to intervene so that they can be guaranteed “the right to observe a sky free from unnecessary artificial polluting sources.”

The backlash led SpaceX to darken the satellites. But they couldn’t darken the solar panels (which made up 75 percent of the brightness) and keep the satellites running at the same time, making the entire effort nearly useless. So, satellites are now “photobombing” astronomy images.

Soon, these satellites will redefine astronomy. Gone will be the Big Dipper, Orion, and other constellations. Those familiar patterns will be replaced by artificial satellite constellations. I fear that one day my kids might say, “Look, Mommy! I see the Starlink Constellation!”

In an article for Scientific American, research astronomer Ronald Drimmel mourns the loss of not just stars from view, but also the significance of a star-filled sky. For generations, it has reminded every person who has looked up “that we and our problems are small, and that our meaningfulness may finally lie just in our ability to recognize and admire the wonder and beauty of a universe larger than us, yet of which we are a part.”

We are very close to losing that dome and our sense of connectedness along with it. The night sky I’d looked up at on that night in 2017 continues to fuel me with wonder. It has influenced my interest in astronomy and in science writing. Future generations will lose a few stargazing experiences. But more than that, they will not even get a chance to feel that awe and wonder that has inspired so many astronomers for their entire lifetimes. That is terrifying and sorrowful.

arXiv (2020). Preprint: 2001.10952v2 [astro-ph.IM] Nature (2020). DOI: 10.1038/d41586020-02480-5